A 104-year-old woman was the first elderly woman to be vaccinated against covid-19 in Peru, where the immunization campaign for the elderly began this Monday, simultaneously with members of the Armed Forces and the National Police.
Accompanied by her relatives, the great-great-grandmother María Eudocia Araya Viuda de Montenegro received the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine at her home, in the Lince district of Lima, during the first day of vaccination for older adults.
In this new stage of the immunization campaign, which follows the inoculation of health personnel, members of the country’s military and police forces will also be vaccinated.
For this, it will use the batches that the US laboratory Pfizer will send weekly, starting from the first delivery of 50,000 doses that arrived last week, until reaching 250,000 by the end of the month, and then receiving 800,000 during April.
INSUFFICIENT FOR BOARD MEMBERS
Once the immunization of the elderly and members of the Armed Forces and the National Police is completed, it will be the turn of Peruvians between 18 and 59 years of age.
Within the vaccination schedule, the Government of Francisco Sagasti establishes as a priority the inoculation of citizens who were called to be members of the polling stations in the general elections on April 11.
However, given the delay in the arrival of the doses, the authorities avoided considering the vaccination against covid-19 a condition for their participation in the first round of the elections and that is that, to date, there are not enough vaccines to meet that requirement.
320,000 VACCINATIONS
In early February, the Andean country received the first million doses of the coronavirus vaccine from the Chinese laboratory Sinpharm.
With this batch, the immunization campaign for health personnel began, with which a total of 321,779 people have already been vaccinated.
Next Wednesday, March 10, 117,000 vaccines sent by the Covax Facility will arrive in the country as part of the first batch of the 13.2 million doses committed to that international mechanism.
The South American country has purchased, so far, a total of 48 million doses: 20 million from Pfizer, 14 million from AstraZeneca, 13.2 million from Covax and one million doses from Sinopharm, which are part of a larger agreement for the total purchase of 38 million vaccines from this Chinese laboratory.
1.37 MILLION INFECTED
According to the latest official balance of the Ministry of Health (Minsa), in the last 24 hours a total of 3,552 positive cases of covid-19 and 173 deaths from the disease were detected.
In this way, a total of 1,371,176 infected and 47,854 deaths were reached since the coronavirus arrived a year ago in the country, where there are currently 14,353 hospitalized patients and 1,276,245 discharged.